The second biggest sporting event of the year is here!  The Indianapolis Colts vs. the New Orleans Saints.  Your Living Room.  The local dive bar.  ESPN Zone. The Sun Life Stadium in Miami Florida? Most of us will be huddled around a TV in bars and living rooms across the country with friends and neighbors watching the game (or watching the ads). Here’s what we we’re thinking…

1. You invite us to your party…

Share your preparations, thoughts, opinions, photos, smack-talk, homemade salsa, celebrations, tears and locations using Brightkite. Let us all know where you are, who you are with and what you are thinking. Use hashtags #superbowl, #SB44, #colts, #saints, or even #whodat to share with the rest of Brightkite (and Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc).

2. We’ll invite you to ours…

Join the global Brightkite Superbowl Party by watching the Superbowl Wall. The wall is a dynamic view into the Brightkite stream designed to be projected or shown live at an event. You can throw the wall up on a laptop at your party or connect it to a bigger screen. We are working with some sports bars in Indianapolis and New Orleans to show the wall, so that everyone can see your touch down celebrations. Remember to post to ‘everyone’ if you want your post to go on the public wall – but remember that anyone can see it!

Get the Brightkite Superbowl wall here.

If you are hosting a party, or own a sports bar and would like some help setting up the wall, getting some stickers or just want to tell us about it, please email us a help (at) Brightkite (dot) com

The biggest sporting event of the year? We’ll have to wait until June, but some of us are already excited.

The Brightkite apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm have been joined in the stable block by a shiny new native app for Nokia Symbian phones. You can download it for free here.

The app brings the same, award winning, UI from the iPhone and Android apps to the N97, the XpressMusic 5800 and other Symbian series 5 phones. Some Brighkite users have been testing the app for a couple of weeks – you can see some of there comments in their posts: Mariraku & Robonova.

Take the app out for a gallop and, as ever, let us know how we can make it better.

Android users – you are up next for an update. More here soon.

#artinseattle is a hashtag that tracks street art in the Seattle area. Some of this art is intended as a permanent installation, some will be washed away next time it rains. Being able to post a photo tied to the location is a perfect way to document the street art of a city, and its obvious from the stream that Seattle has a rich selection.

Why not start posting Streetart in your neighborhood? Use the hashtag #streetart and share with everyone, whether its a sticker on a lampost, or the latest Banksy.

Palm Pre and Pixie users no longer have to look jealously at their friends with iPhones, Blackberry’s and Android phones. We all owe a huge debt of thanks to Brightkite users barkerja and kylepauljohnson who have built Parafoil – a native Brightkite app for the Palm webOS.

You can download the app from Palm, starting today. For more information on Parafoil, see their site or follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

Today is also barkerja’s birthday – so as well as thanking him for Parafoil, be sure to cut him a slice of cake, pour him a glass of something, or tickle his ferret. Happy birthday John!

Thanks once again to John and Kyle. Screenshots of Parafoil below:

We wanted to call out one Brightkite user who we noticed going above and beyond yesterday. Meet @daveflys who gave his time to spend yesterday “Sorting, packing, weighing, logging, and palatalizing food and supplies bound for #Haiti”

Dave posted a few great photos of the work he is doing in Florida:

If you are working to help the people in Haiti, or just doing your part from home, add the hashtag #Haiti to your posts and share it with the rest of the Brightkite community. For members in the US, don’t forget the MTV telethon at 8pm tonight. If you are watching, let us all know what you think.

Details on the open positions can be found on the jobs section of the site.

You can start to get to know Jon  by browsing through some of his posts. Please make him welcome!

The Nokia app has been submitted to the Ovi store, but is not yet publicly available. We’ll tell you more about it as soon as it’s live. For now a screen shot of the home page…

Hats off to @acho and @bitsoil for creating a great way to use #hashtags & Brightkite – #bkfow. Each week, a type of food is chosen and then people post their photos of that type of food with the #bkfow tag. This has been running for several weeks already and there are some stunning posts in the stream – its well worth a few minutes to scroll through.

If you want to join in, check the list for the week’s food and get eating, snapping and posting – this weeks food is shellfish.

While I’ll still be hanging around Brightkite (don’t be a stranger), I’m sad to be leaving. It’s been a great ride and there is so much that I am grateful for. The year and a half that I’ve been with Brightkite has been wonderful; I’ve met some amazing people and forged some very special friendships along the way.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a great team of people on an insanely cool product and there’s really only one word that can describe the experience: awesome.

So here’s to you Brightkite, and everyone out there that has helped make it so special. Cheers and thanks for the memories!

Some of you may be wondering who is going to fill my shoes, well that’s where we get to the “sweet” part of the bittersweet news. We’re excited to introduce you to Brightkite’s new Community Manager Melinda! Melinda has lived in Maui and Seattle before ending up in San Francisco, and she comes to Brightkite after working as the Community Manager for LiquidPlanner. She’s an awesome girl and we think she’ll fit right in. Please send her a warm welcome and add her to your friends, you’ll be hearing a lot from her starting next year. :)

Santa-on-wheels

crobj saw the man in the red suit travelling in a Florida style, probably heading to the 19th hole.

Four Legged Santa

Brightkite’s very own complex swept the four legged category by humiliating his beloved hound. But check out the look he got in return

Cross Dressing Santa

We all know Santa is a boy, but chururun saw him dressed in a fluffy frock at some sort of cycling event (check out the blur in the upper left). You don’t fool us Santa.

Tiniest Santa

Over in England, ianrathbone found the tiniest Santa in his Lego Advent calendar. Santa seemed to give him the finger, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Psycho Santa

Be careful if you take a shower tonight – rumors abound of a Psycho Santa. Ask Mink for more details.

Hold on a minute, which is the real Santa?

Now then, we thought there was only one Santa, but FutureSarah has evidence to the contrary. Unless these are people pretending to be Santa – but why would they do that?

Green Santa

Back in the UK, gjtaylor saw Santa playing the environmental card and taking the tube. At least people had the manners to let him sit. Rudolf and co. should be well rested.

Take it to the Bridge, Santa

Yep – yts found Santa and he said… “Fellas, I’m ready to get up and do my thing” and we said “yeah go ahead!”

So that’s it – which were your favourites? And tonight it Santa’s big night – so if you see him doing his rounds, be sure to take a picture and pour him a glass of something. Its not too late to enter. A very Merry and Happy Holidays from all of us, to all of you &  your loved ones, and especially to Santa.